


A Little Wick in the Head

by kashinoha



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Footnotes, Madness, Venice!Jonathan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:32:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4627116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kashinoha/pseuds/kashinoha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially in Venice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Wick in the Head

**Author's Note:**

> This is my auction fill for Wraithwitch, who requested some mad!Jonathan who is all manners of messed up. Up until now my works in the fandom have been more on the humorous side, but with this I was going more for chilling. Hope it worked.
> 
> Wrote this while listening to Rachmaninoff's _The Isle of the Dead_ Op. 29.

 

**A Little Wick in the Head  
**

All characters © Susanna Clarke

 

 

He thinks perhaps he should make up with Time, as he has with Lord Byron. It is not Time’s fault that the hour is stuck, rather a sort of temporal indigestion that makes Strange dizzy all over with the peristalsis of being digested by his own past and future.

“What is your opinion?” he asks the Neapolitan sitting on his bed. “Should I start blowing out the candles in peoples’ heads?”

The Neapolitan shrugs, bits of skin flaking onto the ratty quilts. Ah, well. It is not like Strange has been using the bed much anyway.

“There is the possibility that they could die from it,” he frets, scratching his newly-grown beard. It proves a minor nuisance, itchy and uneven, but a proper trimming would require one to look in a mirror. He is not quite ready for that.

 _“Sarranno comm’a me,”_ says the Neapolitan, chewing on something that had crawled from one nostril into its mouth. 1

Strange looks at the Neapolitan. “Oh you are no help at all,” he says, in Hellish.

 

 

The parish of Santa Maria Zobenigo has begun to smell funny. It is not an odor Strange can place, but it is mildly offensive nonetheless. He has not bathed in weeks (years?), so he wonders if it is in fact he who smells, but at least it covers up the pineapples.

Sometimes he thinks he sees Lord Byron peering up into his window. Sometimes Lord Byron has the head of a ram and six eyes and is smoking hashish,2 and sometimes he appears different altogether. Strange finds he does not really mind (though he misses playing billiards with the fellow, ram or otherwise).

“Did I ever teach Byron how to scry?” He shakes his head. “I do not believe I did, as I would have been well aware of his voyeuristic inclinations…or rather, Mr Strange would have been…” he trails off, unable to remember quite who he is for a moment.

He tries doing blood magic some nights, spattering the floor with black brackish speckles and feeling weak and cold once it is over, reaching for his grappa and near throwing it up afterward.

Henry, looking down at him on the floor smeared in his own blood and dust, shakes his head and says, “God will not love you for this, Jonathan.” His cross swings in the air and catches the alien starlight outside the window.

“I do not care if He loves me or abandons me,” pants Strange, wiping sweat from his face. “I only wish to see your sister amongst the living once more. Even if I shall take her place.”

Henry smirks. “Since when did you care about anyone other than yourself?” he asks.

At this Strange laughs, and he does not stop for a long time. “Since I discovered fairies were right bastards,” he says, and comes to roll on his back. He stares up at the ceiling and for a moment thinks it is made of cats.

Henry only shakes his head, his right eye filling up with blood.

 

 

There is so much to learn! Why has he not seen this before? Perhaps sanity makes one stupid and boorish, Strange muses as he swallows his draught and strikes a match. All those _sensible_ people with candles in their heads, hah! Strange quite thinks his own head holds gas lighting, or perhaps even some form of electricity.

He tries his hand at Botomancy, pulling vervain out of his sleeve without a second thought. The words come easy. He subsequently manages to set his sleeve on fire, but not before seeing some lovely images of what looked like Americans shooting at each other,3  a Slav musician whose name Strange thinks might have been Chai-Coffee,4  and a rather scantily clad man in blue. He paints sigils out of sloe, not entirely sure how he has procured sloe in the first place and finds that he is humming the Raven King’s Ballad as he does do.

“I hope you are happy, your Majesty,” Strange tells the King, though he is not in fact there at all. He huffs. “Even with all my sense robbed from me, I still cannot see you. What a fickle gent you are!”

Who he does see, every so often, is _her._ Except when he extends his fingers they meet nothing but the night wind and the fog of his breath before him. It is those times he takes himself in hand and cries as he spills, ashamed, though there is no one around to see.

“There is never anyone, not anymore,” whispers Strange, fingers sticky with sorrow.

 

 

“Did you have something to do with the pineapples?” he asks Stephen one night.

“No sir,” says Stephen.

Strange makes a noise of frustration. “Then where could they have come from? I have had no trauma of produce in my youth. Surely the benthos of my consciousness is mistaken, unless pineapples contain magical properties unbeknownst to me. Do not look at me so, butler. I have apologized to you for forgetting your name.”

“Are you able to recall it now?” asks Stephen, curious.

For a brief moment Strange looks frightened, and quite young. “I—“he shakes his head. “I cannot recall much of anything, I am afraid.”

“I am sorry for it, sir,” Stephen says, and he means it. The Gentleman beside him says nothing, but claps his hands together in delight and laughs.

Strange seems to hear it. “They think I am moon-sick,” he tells Stephen. “The candle-people. They are quite right, but really! That is the fault of your partner here. Cannot you see it in you to convince him to free me and my wife?”

“No, I do not believe I can,” replies Stephen, looking quite sad.

 

 

The Neapolitan is back.

It’s oozing some purulent substance that vaguely resembles liquid pearls, but a bit more rancid and Strange is lucky he did a spell to prevent his olfactory senses from working otherwise he might have gone mad. Was it possible for a person become mad twice over?

The Neapolitan asks him if he has any veal fricassee.

Strange opens his arms. “Do I look like I have any veal fricassee?” he says, annoyed. Food does not… _work_ right in the Darkness. He does not seem to need it as frequently, and when he does it tastes like ashes and moss.

“Food is for the sun-dwellers,” Strange informs the Neapolitan. He clears his throat noisily. He’s developed a cough, but it is more from physical neglect than from any magic. On the contrary, he is at the height of his power, and this sky has a three-face moon that sings to him and makes his innards tingle.

The Neapolitan looks disappointed.

Strange, chewing on his bottom lip (a habit he has recently acquired when he is too long without his tincture), reaches for the vial of mouse. It is almost gone, so he has to ration now.

He takes a swallow and thinks his beard is on fire.

 

 

He has found the Heartache Box again, it having rolled under the bed for a period of time to be claimed by cobwebs and dust-bunnies with a taste for flesh. Whenever Strange opens it he thinks he can hear the faint inklings of music, like a ball in a snow globe. He takes out the finger, holds it over flames, even tries feeding it to a cat, but all spells bounce off it.

And he cannot see it in the mirror. He needs more _rodentia vitae._

“If you were severed from Lady Pole ten years ago, does that not mean you are ten years younger than Lady Pole?” he hypothesizes. A thought comes to him. “If I were to reattach you, Lady Pole would have a little pinky!” The thought is so hilarious that he laughs and howls until he coughs and then he laughs some more.

He wonders if his landlord is still below, or if he has fled with the rest of Venice. “Surely they do not fear _der Hexenmeister,”_ Strange mutters. “I do not bite.” He opens the Heartache Box and grins. “Well, only mice and Frenchmen.”

There is music in his head and in that moment he suddenly experiences a strong desire to attend a Venetian masquerade.

 

 

Dr Greysteel comes once, to check up on him and Strange asks him what year it is in lieu of hello.

Placing a handkerchief over his nose and mouth Dr Greysteel says, “If you will not contend with my company, Mr Strange, I implore you to seek another physician. You do not look well at all.”

“Ah, but I have never been better!” Strange exclaims. His feet are bare. For some reason or another Dr Greysteel has trouble understanding him; there is something wrong with Strange’s mouth. He appears to be chewing on something.

“So you have come to your senses, then.”

Strange snorts. “Why should I deign to do such a thing?” The object in his mouth goes _swish, swish._

Dr Greysteel asks tentatively, “Then you are still under the notion that you must rescue your dead wife?”

 “Of course not,” replies Strange, waving his hand. He peers at Dr Greysteel, and Dr Greysteel gets the fleeting, horrible impression that Strange cannot actually tell if he is real or not. “It is quite impossible to save someone who is dead sir, and my wife is far from it. I take it she will be most pleased to escape the—“here Strange utters a foreign word that Dr Greysteel does not understand.

“I beg of you, Mr Strange,” Dr Greysteel protests, “cease this madness and—“

Suddenly Strange spits out what he had been chewing. It is a tail, Dr Greysteel observes, hairless and pink. A rat’s tail. He suddenly knows what is wrong with Strange’s mouth. It clicks in his head and spreads down his spine, and he realizes then that fear is cold.

There are little grey hairs around Strange’s lips and between his teeth.

 

 

The snow begins to fall, and Strange starts talking to mirrors.

It would be so easy, to hide in one until the light comes, but he _promised._ She will be so very cross with him if he breaks it. Seven years ill luck. Or more like one hundred.

There are stars in his eyes, and all the tears in the world will not get them out. How will he save her?

“Why do you not ask the ravens?” his reflection asks him.

“Abracadabra,” Strange says, and giggles to himself.

 

 

He tilts his head, spittle shining on his bottom lip, as a raven licks blood from his finger with a black tongue. He feels compelled to call the raven Mr Norrell, but that is not its name and he thinks it would become most disgruntled if he addressed it as such. Typical of Mr Norrell!

“Will you ask them for me?” he whispers. “To open the Doors, destroy the liars’ paradox, inflict the final justice?”

“Yes,” replies the raven. Strange grins, and finds that he is salivating. How odd.

He looks over and sees the fairy stamping his foot in anger, only there is fur on his face and his eyes are yellow and snarling. It fills him with joy, because all things must come to an end and she is just a fingertip’s breath away. He begins to sob a little.

Holding out his arms, he speaks to the thunder that covers grief and muffles lies, the trees that hiss in the breeze, and the stones of bedrock that know all tales. The Morrigan’s ravens. The ghost-smoke on the waters. The moon, burbling and squirming in his ears. They tell him the most curious things. Why has he never bothered to listen?

“Come forth,” Jonathan Strange says, licking his tears. “Come forth as you never have before, come forth from the rain and own the world once more.”

He begins chewing his lip again, until blood stains his teeth and begins to run down his chin in little rivulets. But for the life of him, he cannot seem to stop.

 

_End._

 

* * *

Footnotes:

 

1 “They will be like me.” Thanks for the help, Scrabble-wars!

2 Curious fact: hemp was exported by Italy in the early 1800s to surrounding European countries. In America, hemp was managed and maintained by black slaves. Also around this time, European writers were turning to hashish and cannabis for creative inspiration. It is unknown if Lord Byron ever mixed his tobacco with hashish, but it is likely. Tobacco-hemp mixtures were sold freely in Europe, and it is assumed that Byron did in fact use drugs such as opium.

3 Apparently, Strange proved more skillful at seeing into the future than into the present. Among other things that had yet to happen he saw the Civil War, which would occur almost half a century later.

4 Tchaikovsky, who later composed the famous Manfred Symphony based on Lord Byron’s 1817 poem of a tormented, wandering magician.

 

 


End file.
